Linguistic repertoires as biographical indexes: Indigenous students’ multimodal (self) representations through linguistic portraits

Abstract

This paper adopts a conception of language as repertoire, conceived as an emergent set of semiotic resources that reflects life trajectories located in specific times and spaces. From this theoretical perspective, it analyzes dimensions of the configuration of the communicative repertoires of Indigenous individuals in the postcolonial contemporaneity. The empirical data under analysis was generated in a linguistic education context and consists of oral, written and multimodal registers of emerging interactions on the production and presentation of linguistic portraits. The analysis aims to highlight the pedagogical relevance of (self)representation of linguistic repertoires as a starting point for language education and as a research tool on linguistic resources, practices and ideologies.